Once you realize that the people you spend your life criticizing, hating and condemning aren’t much different than you, there isn’t much you can do to come back from that. When you hate everyone including yourself, how can you argue that you have something or anyone to live for? You can’t. That’s exactly what Holden went through. The novel Catcher in the Rye starts out with Holden Caulfield as a student attending Pencey Prep and from there the rest of the books takes us on the journey that is Caulfield’s life. The very few ups and tumultuous downs are described in great detail and gives the reader a fair understanding of who Holden Caufield is and why he is the way he is. The moments in his life that define who he is and affects how and why he views the world in such a negative way, and the very few moments that make it seem like he has something to live for are all written in great detail.
Disliked and misunderstood, Holden at one point can barely stand his own existence. From the very beginning of the novel, I had a clear understanding of the type of person Holden Caulfield was. Lazy and pessimistic were the first adjectives I used to describe him. One of the quotes that always stick out to me when reflecting on my first impression of Holden comes from the very first page of the novel. Holden, who also narrates the entire novel, is introducing himself and refuses to tell the reader about his life’s story. Salinger writes, “If you really wanna hear about it, the first thing you’ll want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them” (Salinger, 1). The tone alone was enough to give me some insight into Caulfield’s attitude and the way in which he speaks. His laziness and disinterest in giving the reader some insight as to who his parents were or who he is says a lot about his character and his lack of sympathy for the reader that must go on without knowing much about the character they’ll spend 214 pages learning about but there’s much to learn about Holden even though he refuses to say it himself. The entire novel focuses on his life and adventures and every moment gives the reader some insight into who he was and what he lived for. It allows the reader to see that he, in fact, had nothing to live, at least that’s my opinion. Its hard to argue against that opinion when Holden finds three negatives for every positive he’s able to see.
Throughout the entire novel, there are so many moments that make your question whether Holden has something to live for. Its as if Holden is in constant battle with himself deciding whether he has some motivation that keeps him alive. For the most part, he doesn’t. There’s moments where things are looking up for Holden and then even during the happiest moments of his life he’s able to find 5 negatives for every positive aspect of a happy moment in his life. One of the quotes that caught my eye was “Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.” Holden is talking about these brand new skates his mother had bought him and they ended up being the wrong kind of skates because he was hoping for racing skates and his mother bought him hockey skates. Then there seems to be this constant theme of death. Copperfield is constantly thinking about hypotheticals where he dies and he talks about people’s reaction to his death or the way they’ll bash him even after being six feet under. He has this mindset where he believes that people will still have this hatred, a hatred that might not even exist, towards him even after his death. Holden says, “When you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody” (Salinger, 155). Holden feels as if it would be a pointless gesture for people to visit him at the cemetery because in his opinion dead people don’t care about flowers. Then when talking about how someone wrote “Fuck you” in his old elementary school, Holden becomes upset because he feels like there’s no place that is pure and full of innocence where kids can be protected from the filth and the “Fuck you”s that the world is filled with. The sort of death of innocence that Holden worries about happens a lot earlier than he suspects and therefore he fails to see the fact that the words “Fuck you” in an elementary school aren’t as blasphemous as he would like to believe. If Holden sees protecting the youth and their innocence as his motive to live, then moments like these just prove that even when Holden wants to believe in something, there’s no denying the truth and for Holden that truth is that “You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say “Fuck you.” I’m positive, in fact” (Salinger 201).
One last quote that caught my eye and fits in with the reoccurring themes of death and hopelessness is “Anyway, I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will” (Salinger 141).
Even when there’s some hope for Holden there’s always that negative aspect of the situation that he holds onto. It could be the only thing keeping him alive and will not cease to criticize and find all of the negatives of person or thing. When Jane Gallagher first came up early on in the novel, I had yet to see much of the positives in Holden’s life and the type of language and writing was something I hadn’t seen in the novel up until this point. Its almost as if I could see Holden’s eyes light up as he spoke or event thought about her so I thought that this was it, his motivation and only reason for living. Salinger writes, “She was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they’d bore you or something. Jane was different. We’d get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we’d start holding hands, and we wouldn’t quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a big deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were” (Salinger, 79). When Holden first said this I believed that this would be the plot twist in the novel. From here on out it would be a “happily ever after” for him but that’s clearly not what happened. When all else failed to keep Holden alive, love would be that one savior but then Holden himself seems to put that in a negative perspective. He’s always so quick to turn something so good into something negative. What shatters this one piece of hope that Holden holds on to is Jane’s loss of innocence. Salinger writes, “Every time I got to the part about her out with Stradlater in that damn Ed Banky’s car, it almost drove me crazy. I knew she wouldn’t let him get to first base with her, but it drove me crazy anyway. I don’t even like to talk about it, if you want to know the truth” (Salinger, 80). What bothers Holden is the possibility that Jane might have done something with Stradlater and even the possibility of Jane not being the epitome of purity and innocence is concerning to Holden.
When taking into consideration the philosophical perspectives of philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, it’s difficult to see that there’s hope for Holden. It becomes challenging to find something that holds even the slightest significance to Holden that he can hold on to.